Yet for others, particularly those who did not have to deal with him first hand, Justinian was a totemic emperor who deserved mention in the same breath as Augustus and Constantine. To them, he was a titan whose terrible magnificence shone far beyond the confines of his own times—so fiercely that many centuries later Dante Alighieri placed him in Paradise as the archetypal Roman: peerless lawgiver and a radiant, supremely gifted caesar, who appeared in the afterlife surrounded by a light as bright and blinding as the sun.
